Getting links to your website is a very important task for any webmaster working on search engine optimization. Those new to link building, however, often have many questions about the process that involve how quickly they should build links for the best results. This article will address those questions.
Some of these questions include:
How fast should I get links to my website?
How many links should I build each week or each month?
Does Google penalize me for building these links very fast?
Will Google not rank me for building these links too slowly?
The answer to these questions will be thoroughly examined in this article. Let's get started.
The normal link building rate is "Natural"
"Natural" in the sense that the ideal scenario would mean that some visitor found your website, either through search engines or other sources, read your content, and liked it, so they linked to it.
The implication, of course, is that not all visitors will link to you. So this figure can be a bit small. If you have a very successful website that does not use any type of SEO services, such as link building, then you will notice that it earns only a few organic links from unique domains each month.
Below is some sample data from successful websites (with no link building services from SEO companies):
You will notice that one website is getting 4 links per month from unique domains. And at least one website is getting one link each month. The average of the above data is around 2 links per month.
These websites do not have ranking or traffic-related problems. I've just presented the data to show that getting links to a website does not need to involve a massive amount of work each month in order to produce positive results in ranking. The key is to be as natural as possible.
The second thing to keep in mind about link building is that quality beats quantity. In Google, organic links are editorial links -- that is, links that come from within the content part of the page. These are quality links that will have a positive impact on your rankings. The growth of editorial links to your website depends on how aggressive your website is in delivering content.
Keep in mind that if you are publishing a lot of quality content daily, then the rate at which visitors can view your content is higher than a website that is stagnant and does not add or update its content.
In this scenario, you can expect a higher amount of editorial links. Good examples of sites that receive a lot of editorial links are news websites, such as huffingtonpost.com and foxnews.com.
Forums also are constantly updated, as well as blogs, so you can expect a larger amount of readers, which can relate to a higher amount of editorial links earned per month.
Slow and fast link acquisition can't hurt
A natural link profile is either fast or slow, because it is supported by natural occurring events.
Good examples are websites generating a high amount of buzz, such as Wikileaks. Consider what happened when Julian Assange released confidential and secret documents to his Wikileaks website. It generated massive buzz, which also generated a large number of links to his website.
A slow profile for link acquisition is okay, too. For example, you can't expect academic websites to generate as much buzz as Wikileaks, but they will attract at least a few links each month from other readers in the academic field.
So to answer these questions: "How fast should I get links to my website?" "What seems to be an acceptable number of links to build each month?" Remember that if you're building a large number of links to your website, that high amount of links earned must be supported; there must be some reason behind it. A good approach would be to generate buzz from your website. There are a lot of cool ways to do this:
Publishing controversial or viral content - A good example is Wikileaks. Publishing secret stories from the government will certainly generate a lot of buzz.
Viral videos about something - A war video leak, for example, or a rare footage of a Russian brown bear fighting with a Siberian tiger. Make sure you own it, and that it's real. Fake viral videos can get you nowhere, and copied videos can lead you to infringement issues.
Viral photos - These have been proven effective, but make sure they're legal. Some paparazzi websites do this, and they earn a lot of links from this, especially if a prominent public figure is caught doing something wild on camera.
Some webmasters actively build links. But it looks bad to build a massive amount of links to a website that is not updated at all or has little content on it.
Link Trading 
